Sally Bayley - Girl With Dove

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © Sally Bayley 2018

Cover photograph © Arcangel Images/Adam Bird

Cover design by Heike Schüssler

Sally Bayley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780008226893

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008226879

Version: 2018-11-23

For Angela Christine Bayley,

Soul of a Rose

‘Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.’

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (English edition, 1952, translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr)

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface: The Reader’s Backstory

PART ONE

1 Miss Marple

2 Grandmothers

3 The Village

4 Jane Eyre and Verity

5 Di

6 Behind Closed Doors

7 Poor Sue

8 Rocks from the Sky

9 David Copperfield

10 Peggotty

11 Betsey Trotwood

12 Hand-Me-Down Histories

PART TWO

13 Aunt Jayne

14 The Silver Jubilee

15 The Beach Hotel

16 A Murder is Announced

17 Margaret Thatcher Moves In

18 The Estate

19 A Few Facts

20 Wedgwood in the Front Room

21 Learning to Speak Nicely

22 The Major and His Wife

23 The Body in the Library

24 Bertha

PART THREE

25 On Her Small Brown Wings

26 Expert Opinions

27 Social Workers and Souls

28 A Momentous Interview

29 The Inexorable

30 Colwood

31 An Angry Goblin’s Cell

32 The Story of Sue

33 Crossing the Meadow

34 A Winter’s Tale

35 The Great Gig in the Sky

36 The End

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Credits

Also by Sally Bayley

About the Author

About the Publisher

Preface

All stories have backstories, at least all stories worth knowing about, and all readers want to pry into those unlit spaces. We read to get back to those dark and dusty corners, to scrape back to old patterns: the strange symbol beneath the damp plaster, the squiggles on the crumbling wall. Reading is a strong torch shining through the dark.

As a child I was terrified of the story of Sleeping Beauty and the jealous old fairy who stalks the palace grounds. The fairy is furious that someone so enchanting should live, so she casts a spell on Beauty. Soon after, Beauty pricks her finger on a spindle; the needle is so sharp, and cuts so deep, that everyone is sure Beauty will bleed to death.

But another, kinder, fairy turns back the spell so that Beauty will not die, but instead sleeps for a hundred years. Everyone agrees that this is better than nothing: sleeping is better than dying. But from that day on, the king and queen begin to watch their daughter and worry. Not a day goes by that they don’t think of that sharp needle cutting through their fair daughter’s skin.

——————————

Reading is a form of escape, and an avid reader is an escape artist. I began my escape the moment I started to read. Aged four, I already had sentences stored up; I knew some words and I could put them together in a line.

But Mum didn’t have enough time to help me. She was managing babies and nappies; she was turning dingy cotton nappies from grey to white. Back from grey to white, sparkling white.

But white is very hard to get back once it’s been ruined . Mum used that word a lot. To ruin something was to turn it from white to grey. Nappies were never completely ruined, because you could boil them and bring them back to life. Nappies could always start again, as long as you kept them on the boil for long enough and didn’t mind the steam.

Mum hated plastic on babies’ bottoms. She preferred cotton, and cotton needed cooking to make it clean.

Every day Mummy boiled the nappies inside a large grey saucepan that sat on the hob. I climbed on a stool and peered down into the grey water. I stirred the nappies with a wooden spoon, and I was the Nappy Witch.

Mummy took out the nappies and hung them on the backline. They flapped in the breeze. I ran underneath them, and when they touched my scalp I screamed. Nappies were hard and scratchy. I asked Mummy why nappies weren’t soft, and she said they had to be strong so they could take all that scalding hot water.

‘But why do you boil them so much, Mummy? You’re making them hard.’

‘You can’t have those nasty plastic things so close to a baby’s bottom. Cotton is what you should put next to a baby’s bottom, nice strong cotton.’

Strong cotton, strong cotton, strong cotton. Strong cotton. I sat beneath Strong Cotton and I felt my brother’s fingers and toes. Strong cotton kept out the sky, strong cotton kept the wind away. Strong cotton kept babies nice and safe.

I made a tent from strong cotton and put my baby brother David in it. David was Baby Jesus and I was Mary, which, by the way, is my middle name.

‘Where on earth have you put the baby?’ Mummy asked. ‘Stop playing silly devils.’ Her face was hot and red and the clouds were poking up from behind.

‘He’s here, Mummy. He’s asleep, beneath the strong cotton.’

‘I can see that, young lady, I’m not blind. Stop playing silly devils with the baby. Leave him there under the tree, near the roses, where I told you. I want him out where I can see him.’

Mummy stuck her nose in the air and went back into the kitchen.

Then one day David went missing. I couldn’t find him anywhere. He was no longer beneath the roses when I went out after lunch. I put my hand inside his cot and felt soft white cotton on my hands, bare white cotton, warm cotton, and I yelled,

‘Mummy, Mummy, David’s not here! Mummy, Mummy, David’s not here! Mummy, Mummy, where is David, Mummy, where is David?’

Sometime in the summer of 1976, the very hot summer, the summer we were all dripping-hot and cross, the Nappy Witch came and took David away, and Mummy went to bed for a very long time. She went for two hundred sleeps, maybe more. Soon after, the Lady Upstairs moved in and Mummy fell under a thick, dark spell. She didn’t wake for years.

1

Miss Marple was at the back of her garden wrestling with her roses when Dolly Bantry called by. The greenfly had got to them again and she was determined to see them off. Dolly would just have to wait for her tea! Miss Marple gave a vigorous spray from her bottle of lemon-scented chemicals. She shook the pink petals ever so gently and untied her garden apron. She rubbed her hands and gave one of her small, barely noticeable smiles.